Lady Aberfeldie used her softest yet firmest voice as she spoke to Eveline, but it sounded to the latter as the voice of one who was a long, long way off.
She made no immediate reply; but with her hands tightly interlaced, as if thereby she would quell emotion, seemed to be gazing down at her nicely pointed little foot that rested on a velvet fender-stool.
'Why mope here, growing pale and thin, for a thing without substance—a dream—a shadow, Eveline; you understand me?'
'A dream—a shadow, indeed, mamma!'
'You hear me, child?' said her mother.
'Yes, mamma,' replied Eveline, who seemed to shiver with cold as her mother left her, but with a long backward glance that had more of menace than entreaty in it.
'He never loved me,' Eveline was thinking. 'I have given my heart for nothing, and am now cast aside for another, like a broken toy discarded by a child. He dared to trifle with me—my father's daughter! It is clear now that he fancied, or merely pretended to be in love with me, while all the time his heart was given to—Alice!'
And she would have been either more or less than human, if with her just indignation there did not mingle a certain sentiment of revenge that bore her up in the part she meant to act now; though she shrank as yet from the conviction that, when esteem dies, love dies with it.
So that evening Eveline wore the suite of jewels—such jewels as Bond Street alone can furnish—and Sir Paget, as he sat by her side, jerked his little bald head about, in the exuberance of joy, and in a way that was really alarming.
Olive was looking radiantly beautiful, in a brilliant dinner costume, with Allan's Maltese suite of diamonds and pearls sparkling on her neck and arms, which Lady Aberfeldie had urged her to don in honour of Sir Paget, and in defiance of a moue and pitiful glance of Eveline, who had no small difficulty in acquitting herself at dinner in her new role of fiancée, but nearly broke down when she heard Sir Paget raise his voice and say to her father something that he was not sorry he might say with a clear conscience, and as a matter-of-fact.